Poland hosts Ukraine recovery summit

A LANDMARK conference on Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction opened yesterday in Poland without President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is snubbing the event over a diplomatic row with ally Warsaw.

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Kyiv needs hundreds of billions of dollars to repair the damage caused by Russia's invasion and is trying to whip up international support for investment.

But the event comes with no end to the fighting in sight and could be overshadowed by the spat between Ukraine and Poland - triggered when Ukraine named a military unit after an insurgent group that took part in the massacres of Poles during World War II.

The area around Gdansk’s Amberexpo conference center was cordoned off by numerous armed police officers deployed to prevent provocations, as an ultranationalist Polish party has called for an anti-Ukraine demonstration later in the day, according to AFP journalists at the scene.

Leaders from Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Sweden, as well as EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU Council head Antonio Costa were meeting in the northeastern port city of Gdansk to urge businesses and countries to pour cash into Ukraine when the conflict ends.